Repeal the wheel!

Nowadays there's an activist group avid to ban nearly every recent invention. Nuclear power, commercial fishing, coal for any purpose, damming rivers, gasoline automobiles, filament light bulbs, anything imported from China — except the computers where we share complaints, cameras to record the crimes, and TVs on which we watch the horror.

By THOMAS GELSTHORPE

capecodtimes.com

By THOMAS GELSTHORPE

Posted Jun. 5, 2013 at 2:00 AM
Updated Jun 6, 2013 at 12:35 AM

By THOMAS GELSTHORPE

Posted Jun. 5, 2013 at 2:00 AM
Updated Jun 6, 2013 at 12:35 AM

» Social News

Nowadays there's an activist group avid to ban nearly every recent invention. Nuclear power, commercial fishing, coal for any purpose, damming rivers, gasoline automobiles, filament light bulbs, anything imported from China — except the computers where we share complaints, cameras to record the crimes, and TVs on which we watch the horror.

Garments made in foreign sweatshops are a no-no. Clothes should either be a gift from Grandma, or made as a sideline by Ivy League undergraduates taking a year off in Vermont to study poetry, cheese, or poems about cheese making. While sophomores on sabbatical aren't sobbing over Third World working conditions, they can earn $30 an hour (plus benefits) sewing shorts for Pamela Preen's boutique. If textile jobs dry up in Pakistan, well, that's their tough luck. The peasants can go back to growing rice and yams with hand tools.

Once upon a time, doing chores the easy way was considered progress. The trouble is, labor-saving gizmos need fire, a causative agent for spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Nowadays, emitting carbon dioxide, along with almost every other industrial activity, is a sin. But fussing over the details, tweaking the carbon taxes, picketing the electric companies, the oilers, the frackers, the tankers, the railroads, the airlines — Yikes! Subsidizing this kind of car while punishing that kind of car; manipulating the political and economic system so that people will pay top dollar for stuff they don't really like so the neighbors will think you're environmentally correct. Even the posturing gets tedious.

Instead of quarreling endlessly over minutiae of this dangerous device vs. that unacceptable pollutant, here's a modest proposal that can curtail all industrial sins in a single stroke. It would be easy to detect, therefore a cinch to enforce. Abolish the wheel.

Think how many awful, icky, terrifying aspects of modern life will go "Poof!" No more squirrel-crushing, air-fouling cars and trucks. No more jet skis. No more trains or planes. No more oil wells, for oil wells need drills with elaborate wheels. No more mines, because they can't function without excavators and conveyors. No more mines mean no more coal or concrete; no more iron, copper or cadmium ores contaminating the environment. Without wheels there's no more stuff made on lathes, because lathes are wheels that shape wood and metal. No more steamships because steamships use turbines; no more sailboats because sailboats use pulleys. No more guns, chainsaws, lawn mowers, tractors, cotton gins, windmills, power plants, hydroelectric dams, water pumps.

A world with no "big wheels" will have no more commerce, no more tyrants, no more mass movements to lead people astray. But job creation will be enormous. It will take dozens of people to do the work one wheeled person used to do. Think of the opportunities for bean hoers, woodchoppers, water bucket carriers. Lawyer jobs will balloon. If they can argue over the meaning of what "is" is, they can argue over what is round. "Is a ballpoint pen really a wheel?" might go all the way to the Supreme Court.

Carbon combustion will dwindle to firewood cut with axes and schlepped by hand. Textiles will vanish and be replaced by animal skins, or grass skirts for delicate souls who eschew animal products. Before we know it the pastoral paradise will reappear.

"This won't play in Peoria!" I hear you cry. "Peoria especially, home of Caterpillar tractor where they install hundreds of wheels in every bulldozer tread." Well, you can't change the whole world at once, so let's try the experiment locally. Cape Cod, thanks to its limited access, can become a laboratory, perhaps a vision for a global, wheel-free future. No more round-based gizmos allowed over the bridges. The islands must be included, lest Cape Codders with oxen, sleds and wooden tools get riled over hoity-toity vacationers motoring through our midst on the way to the ferries.

Tourists won't have to travel all the way to New Guinea or the Amazon to observe the quaint lifestyles of the unwheeled, and the tour guides will speak English, like Plimoth Plantation. Be bold, turn back the clock another 20,000 years and feel the pre-industrial joy!

Thomas Gelsthorpe of Cataumet accepts trade-offs as facts of life. Call him at 508-564-4919 or email thomasgelsthorpe@gmail.com.